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Art and the Question of Authorship and Ownership in the Internet Era

Art and the Question of Authorship and Ownership in the Internet Era

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Narendra RaghunathIn this article, Narendra Raghunath, visual artist and faculty, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore draws on personal experience and discusses the complexities of authenticity, authorship and ownership rights of art and the ‘image’ in the contemporary art world.
A couple of years ago, I received an odd request from an unknown person in New York, to authenticate two works of mine. The work looked like mine, except it had some colour fading. It also had my name on the left bottom part in English, as I often write. The only problem was I had no Idea of such a sale or transfer. On further inquiry, I learnt that he sourced the work from a struggling Indian art student. During those days, if anyone would image search my work, Google strangely enough, showed a popular Hollywood actress’s name! This Indian student smartly used that opportunity and somehow managed to convince this poor chap that this actress was a big collector of my work.
During that period, I also had a website where I occasionally published some of my explorations with the caption that ‘none of the works are for sale’. This smart student utilized all these to his advantage to fleece this investor – for a cool $4,800 – for the downloaded prints. But, once the collector began to have doubts about the signature in the authentication letter, he contacted me for verification. The entire episode filled me with mirth. I informed the buyer that there was a colour issue with the print and offered to send him a new set of prints of the same works with my pencil signature (courier costs to be borne by the collector). He happily agreed, and as I did not want the Indian student to get caught in a serious crime in the US, I left it that.
This entire episode provoked me into a deep philosophical question of authenticity of authorship and ownership of an artwork. History of art is filled with stories where the artists and their families died in poverty while their work, later on, made many others billionaires.

If one would Google, one will find millions of photographs of the same artwork with million others’ copyright watermark on it. Cropped differently (composition) with altered colour schemes and digitally enhancements; most of them render the original work into oblivion. Before one jumps into an ethical or moral judgment about the entire affair, one may have to consider some serious philosophical artistic issues involved with image making in this entire affair. Allow me to explain in detail.

What is original in art – Labour/craft or concept?

This is a complicated question. In Western art, from the days of guild during Renaissance to today’s postmodern artists, a large section of artists would not be able to claim authorship of the craft of labour. Most of them are made to order or are supervised. So, one may have to safely discount that claim from the originality of art. Then comes the conceptual authorship. Usually in an artwork, there are three ways an artist executes an artwork – translation, transformation and transgression. Considering these three areas are largely dealt by curatorial conceptualization in postmodern art, it leaves very little room for the authenticity of authorship of the artwork. Whereas in a film the director is only one of the authors in the creation of the film and due credit is given to others in the process of film making. In art, unfortunately, a single individual as the artist often claims the whole authorship. One would not hear the name of the craftsmen or other people involved in the execution of artworks. There are many conceptualizations involved in every artwork- technical, spatial, curatorial and finally aesthetical conceptualizations. In other words, it becomes a problematic argument when one considers the authenticity of authorship by a single individual.

Work of art and its image reproductions

As I mentioned earlier, on the Internet one will find millions of image reproductions of the same artwork with hundreds of copyrights for photography. In other words, the authenticity of authorship gets separated from artwork in its image reproduction as a photograph. Considering both are artistic mediums and artists execute both, one cannot claim the authorship of the other. In other words, one has the artistic liberty for a selective recreation of another artwork in its image reproduction!

From Greek time onward, this viewer prerogative to reinterpret an artwork as observer in observer-observed and observation triangulation is already a settled subject.

This makes the authenticity of authorship complex phenomena in art world. If an artist makes claim of authorship on a craftsman’s labour in transforming a media ( kindly note an artist is not selling art but sells its material transformation ) and a photographer claims authorship of its image reproduction and then a digital media artist claims authorship of reproduction’s reproduction, in today’s contemporary art world authenticity and authorship becomes a complex issue.

From that US-based Indian student (although I do not know who this person is) I started experimenting with transgressing into master’s works to transform them into historical and theoretical artworks. Still, as I am an old school ethics follower, I do not claim ownership of these works. I only claim the viewer’s transformative inference authorship in such artworks. My experiments are still going on, getting more and more insights into this complex world of authorship and ownership.

Considering no collector or buyer can claim ownership of art but can only claim the ownership of artwork, in today’s world these collectors cannot claim ownership of its image reproduction, unless and until they commission it or buy its rights. Considering artworks are reproduced in critique and reviews in textual format and it is legal, artists cannot take away the viewers inference right in image format as well.

—————————————About the Author: Narendra Raghunath is a Visual Artist based in Bangalore. He is also a teaching faculty at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.

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I have been working on meta-philosophy for quite some time and was pleasantly surprised to encounter, mid-May 2017, someone who shares this commitment (apart from his many other interests and specializations) for very similar reasons as my own. He is Dr Desh Ray Sirswal from India and one of his numerous websites, blogs, journals, etc is – http://drsirswal.webs.com/

I commence by dealing with the teaching of philosophy, because the contents of what is being taught at under-graduate level is for most people who are slightly informed about the subject what philosophy is about. This usually consists of the history of Ideas of Western Philosophy. Although an increasing number of faculties now broaden the scope to the ‘philosophies’ of Asia, the Far East and the Middle East. This international broadening of what is being included in curricula of or as philosophy is another index that Western Philosophy is in need of subject-matter as its traditional subject-matter have all but died out.

Apart from the History of Philosophical ideas, the subject often is presented in terms of so-called branches, for example metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic, and so on. A number of authors suggest that both ways of teaching the discipline is very selective because of the departments adherence to some form of either ‘analytical’ or ‘continental’ philosophy.

Apart from the traditional lecture-style the teaching of philosophy is dealt with by means of some variation on the Oxbridge ‘tutorial’-style. Tutorials are often acclaimed as being an amazing, to be highly regarded innovation. Some studies and research of it however revealed that is not at all very comprehensive but is restricted to a number of items concerning reasoning, argumentation and critical re-viewing and thinking. This approach forms part of the attempt by contemporary research universities to teach aspects of ‘research’.

This brings us to my next section on methods of doing philosophy. I suggest that the doing of philosophy resembles certain aspects and contexts of some of the steps and stages of doing theorizing. This is the rationale for including the next section on theorizing, its steps, stages and other aspects such as the use of metaphors, imaginary experiments, heuristic devices, etc.

The next section deals with the changing nature of traditional philosophy as it lost most of its subject-matter to other disciplines that have been socio-culturally differentiated. And the search for new philosophical subject-matter such as Experimental Philosophy or XPhi, the involvement of philosophers in inter-disciplinary studies, especially the latest fad of cognitive studies or sciences and of course the fabrication of philosophies of all areas of human behaviour and kinds of socio-cultural activities for example sport, the arts, sciences, cognition, sex, violence, gender, race, religion, etc etc.

I then turn to the question about how, where and why one could perhaps do philosophy against the background of the above. In this investigation I make explicit some of the self-imposed limits of the discourse. Some of these restrictions have been created because of the absolute institutionalization of the discipline as just another subject of universities. This institutionalization of course requires that those involved in the discipline of institutionalized philosophy must be professionals. This absolute requirement lays down the condition that to be a philosopher one must be a professional and an academic. The conditions of institutionalization and professionalization have far reaching consequences for the philosophical discourse, its subject-matter, methods, principles, values, aims, purposes and norms. One of these is the need to publish and to publish often especially in peer-reviewed journals and in their required, institutionalized format.

Because of these institutionalized restrictions of what philosophy is, what it must be like, what it may be like and what it may not be like I explore the lack of self-cognition of academically institutionalized philosophy and the associated absence of critical, meta-cognition and self-awareness of professional philosophers. I question the values of doing that type of philosophy, philosophy-on-demand and because of demand and suggest that it is preferable to engage with the more original, creative-thinking philosophers’ work. All of the above are of course intersubjectively determined and this is why I finally explore the nature and operation of different forms of intersubjectivity, for example of common sense, everyday existence, that of the different sciences, the arts, etc and the roles or functions of these things in the creation or constitution of alternative discourses, their realities, life-worlds or perspectives on ‘the world, reality, and existence’.

This is the phantom, the ghost of the deceased discourse of philosophy that I chased, encountered and describe.

An exploration of philosophy, its subject-matter (and development of new objects of study and investigation or philosophizing, for example experimental ‘philosophy’, inter-disciplinary work such as in the discourse of cognitive research and philosophy of everything, i e the arts, sport, religion, sex, love, politics, etc), its methods and confines, both internal and external linits, eg cognitive biases, fallacies, -isms, one-dimensionality, uni-levelled, etc. Philosophy – institutionalization, Professionalization, subject-matter, methods, cognitive biases, fallacies

An exploration of philosophy, its subject-matter (and development of new objects of study and investigation or philosophizing, for example experimental ‘philosophy’, inter-disciplinary work such as in the discourse of cognitive research and philosophy of everything, i e the arts, sport, religion, sex, love, politics, etc), its methods and confines, both internal and external linits, eg cognitive biases, fallacies, -isms, one-dimensionality, uni-levelled, etc. Philosophy – institutionalization, Professionalization, subject-matter, methods, cognitive biases, fallacies

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Exploration of INTERSUBJECTIVITY is continued. Different kinds of if are differentiated and signs for its presence and effects are shown. The difference between it, subjectivity and objectivity are explored.
Intersubjectivity is crucial and universal for general everyday discourse in all cultures, sub-cultures, institutions, communities and socio-cultural practices such as religion, sport, etc or the so-called Manifest Image. It is essential for specialized areas, for example religion, sport and disciplines such as the humanities, arts, sciences, philosophy and all institutions.
It is a necessity for both cultural, social, interpersonal as well as intra-personal existence, emotions, attitudes, values and norms. But, it is not limited to human existence, life-worlds, realities and worlds, but also required for animals and all organisms.
Object Oriented Ontology would emphasize that is it not merely something anthropocentric and restricted to human existence and consciousness (and anthropocentric interpretations of and projections on other objects, non-human creatures and all organisms, as well as all objects.. In the case of the latter one would probably replace the notion of intersubjectivity with terms such as energy and other ways of action and interaction for example intra- and inter-atoms.)
In the Appendix is included work related to the above by others such as Sellars, Brandom (and his two images, Manifest and Scientific), Davidson, Dennett, Habermas, Nagel, etc.